Archive for the 'linear/circular/phase time' Category

I went partying last night in the dome, inside the castle mountain in Graz, where tunnels and bunkers have been carved out by the Nazis during the second Word War and now are used as dance floors and conference spaces. This is music that — given the sheer volume and the drum&base pumping — passes through you, or at least, it does so if “you let it”, as someone told me (ehm, shouted at me) on the dance floor. Now here is a thought. In the morning I had a workshop on my book as part of the Elevate festival, and among other things we discussed the idea that the capital relation, or the value struggle, passes through us. Mmhh, so, what happens when in the evening the music passes through you? It happens that it is banging the capitalist relation out of ourselves, at least momentarily, leading to the momentary uncoupling from the temporal dimension of capital, the one that requires schedules, deadlines, responsibilities that have no or little meaning as well as endless struggle against it. If you add the fact that in music, rhythm constitutes the commons (see this blog entry), then this is it! The dance/rave culture that lives its nights and morning floating from one dance-floor to another, is the contemporary manifestation of what in the 1970s was called “il bisogno di comunismo” (the need for Communism) . . or “commOnism” . . .

An old friend of mine called on a saturday morning, looking for me. But he was told that I was at my regular violin lessons that I started taking few months ago. So he said: “ah ah, so while the world is burning Massimo plays the fiddle!” Indeed, I am, and while I do that I live in another world, and think about its dissonance or parallels with our daily lives.

I have joined the East London Late Starters Orchestra last October, few months after I bought myself a cheap violin.The orchestra is an amazing community. It was set up about 25 years ago, a student run training orchestra for those who pick up an instrument late in life. Tutors-conductors are kind, enthusiastic and very communicative of their own individual approach to music, conducting and technique. I am learning much more than few tunes on the violin. (more…)

The work of reproduction is totally flexible, so much that it even become model for flexible capitalism. The work of reproduction is totally affective, so much that it become model for the affect-capitalism of sckizo-and-smily weitresses. In the work of reproduction with the ones we love, in which we reproduce the individual bodies of a community of affects, we give ourselves to the other, and the degree of which we don’t defines the boudnaries. My child has nightmares tonight, and I lay next to him. I quited him down with a song and now he seems finally asleep. I have done this already three times, and three times I though he was asleep, and three times I attempted to sneak up and reach my nearby laptop to write this damned blog. (more…)